Hollywood Wasn't Always This Boring

Watching the Academy Awards broadcast on Sunday night, I felt as bored as I had in early February, when the official list of award nominees was announced. The speculation about potential Oscar winners seemed so oppressively trite that it almost inspired me to give up my natural fascination with Hollywood altogether. Turning from the TV to the bookshelf for something more entertaining, I found myself reaching once again for the autobiography of a time-honored movie legend, the infamous Errol Flynn.

Flynn himself never managed to win an Oscar, but many of the films he appeared in did. Today, he is probably best known for his outlandish adventures and flagrant scandals. No doubt, he deserved his besmirched legacy. He was a selfish rake who behaved reproachfully whenever he thought he could get away with it, and even sometimes when he knew he couldn’t. But judging from the tales he recounts in his autobiography, he doesn’t appear ever to have been boring. That is one advantage he holds over contemporary Hollywood stars and the inflated hysteria surrounding the Oscars.

Here are a few highlights from Flynn’s gripping memoir that I reread the other night:After the close of World War I, young Flynn found himself adventuring in New Guinea, scouring the land for the fastest route to a fortune. Mining gold with a few other rugged souls sufficed for a time. But soon an easier and still lucrative pastime appeared: shooting exotic birds for their rare feathers. The hunt went so well that Flynn and his cohorts ended up chasing their prey into Dutch colonial territory. As an Australian, Flynn was breaking the law with this maneuver, and he knew that Dutch authorities would quickly be tracking him down in the bush to make an arrest. So he ordered his crew of local tribal men to hastily lash together an improvised raft that would allow them all to escape across a turbulent river and return to Australian land. In the event, however, the raft made it only part of the way. The prize cargo was lost and one of the men was pulled under and eaten alive by a crocodile. Flynn narrowly escaped death himself. He had to pry his legs free from the jaws of another swimming beast before making it securely to shore.

If there was anything Errol Flynn enjoyed more than an encounter with danger, it was heart-pounding romance. While working as a tobacco farm manager, again in New Guinea, he walked into a village one day and came face to face with a stunning young maiden. Wearing only a grass skirt, she stopped Flynn in his tracks. As he reports in his autobiography, he simply “had to buy her.” An affair soon followed. During one swimming excursion in a peaceful river eddy, Flynn’s date speared a six-foot crocodile through the skull, to provide just the right the appetizer for that evening’s romantic meal. As Flynn fondly remembered it, the occasion was “one of my most precious poetic memories.”

Another bizarre tale places Flynn in the middle of gruesome combat during the Spanish Civil War. He had been fighting with his wife, Lili Damita, who was also a celebrated actor, and an adventure to a contested battleground somehow provided a welcome alternative to marital strife. Accompanying him to Spain was his longtime friend Gerrit Koets, who planned to join the war effort by providing medical expertise to wounded troops at military hospitals. Flynn describes travelling with Koets to an area that was getting pummeled heavily by artillery shells. While walking down a darkened street, they were stopped at gunpoint by a woman demanding to see identification papers. Finding the woman sexually attractive, Koets cavalierly reached out to caress her face. And she promptly shot at him, firing a bullet right through his shirt. Luckily for Koets, though, the wound wasn’t serious; it only grazed the skin, and a romance quickly ensued between him and his assailant.

But the morbid reality of war eventually caught up with Koets and Flynn. While working a shift together weeks later at the hospital, the two thrill-seekers watched as the body of Koets’ lover was brought in and placed coldly on a table. She had been raped and murdered. Someone had cut a large gash in her, running the full length of her torso. She was still bleeding. The sight of it brought Flynn himself to the verge of breaking down. But Koets responded impersonally, as only a daredevil doctor of his caliber could. “Remarkable case,” Flynn remembers, were the sparing words Koets chose for the occasion.